


Last Call

by De_Nugis



Series: confessions [2]
Category: Supernatural
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-03-05
Updated: 2011-03-05
Packaged: 2017-10-17 01:44:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,251
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/171625
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/De_Nugis/pseuds/De_Nugis
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>sooner or later, every hunter is going to draw the short straw</p>
            </blockquote>





	Last Call

**Author's Note:**

> So now I remember why I haven't written Gen in a while. Because when I do it's usually totally, miserably depressing. Also, this kind of sort of fills my [own prompt](http://community.livejournal.com/ohsam/148398.html?thread=999086#t999086) at [](http://community.livejournal.com/ohsam/profile)[ **ohsam**](http://community.livejournal.com/ohsam/) 's h/c meme, which is tacky. A coda in an oblique way to the last scene in 6.16, and shamelessly maudlin.

Dean always figured it would be a phone call.

He’s not stupid, he knows the odds. Knew when he handed over the keys and the weapons and got up the courage to knock at Lisa’s door one last time, after she broke up with Matt, that this was what he was letting himself in for. Six years is more than he expected.

He turns off the drill, flicks on the safety, sets it down, strips off his goggles and walks over to Castiel, statue-still and conspicuously inconspicuous by a doorframe that doesn’t have a wall yet. Dean wonders why Cas looks so strange, apart from the fact that he’s an angel Dean hasn’t seen in three years and he’s standing in a construction site, not wearing a hard hat, either, and they’d never let that get by. Then he realizes what it is that’s off, it’s that Cas is in shirtsleeves. He almost opens his mouth to ask where the trenchcoat is, and then he closes it, because that would be stupid, he can see Cas’s face, and the feathery dickwad’s never as expressionless as he thinks he is. He knows Cas is here to tell him that Sam is dead.

“Dean,” says Cas, a statement, then, “You need to come with me,” like Dean doesn’t know that.

“Sam,” he says, and his voice comes out a croak because though he braces himself for this every morning when he wakes up, like clockwork, apparently he’s not ready.

Cas nods. “He is still alive,” he says, and Dean’s heart jumps up into his throat, stupid hope, but Cas is grave and compassionate, no reassurance there. “You will be in time,” he says, but he doesn’t mean Dean will be there to save him. He touches Dean’s forehead and Dean feels the familiar _not again_ swoop and he stumbles onto uneven ground somewhere else. He’ll have some explaining to do to the boss tomorrow.

Sam’s pinned under a tree. Looks like a goddamn redwood, no mere maple or oak for Sam, trust him not to do the dying thing half-way, not this last time. The air smells of charring and ozone, but nothing’s burning. Sam’s eyes are closed and his face is outdoing Cas in the statue department, bled white with blue marble veins and lips to match. There’s a trickle of blood on his chin. Turns out the reason Cas isn’t wearing his trenchcoat is that it’s folded under Sam’s head, and there’s blood on it, too. Dean gives Cas a distracted nod that’s meant to say thanks for coming to get him and thanks for getting the trenchcoat that’s usually, like, sewn to his body all bloody just to give Sam a pillow. Cas nods back gravely and steps aside to wait.

Dean kneels carefully in the snow by his brother. “Hey,” he says. Sam’s eyes open. “You’re supposed to call me,” says Dean, “When you’re being, like, attacked by trees. Not yell for the angel.”

Sam rolls his eyes down to where the redwood trunk is lying across his body. His mouth turns up at the corner where the blood is. “Pretty sure the fucking tree broke my fucking phone,” he whispers. His voice is paper thin, but it’s Sam. Dean eases the trench coat away and props Sam as much as he can, settling his head on his knees. Sam grunts a bit with pain, but then his mouth quirks again.

“You’re wearing a yellow hat,” he says, “Can’t believe that’s going to be my last sight on earth.”

Dean gropes at his head, and yes, he’s still wearing his hard hat. He fumbles it off. “Better?” he says.

“Yeah,” says Sam, “Except now I’m stuck with your face.” Dean gives him the finger, but his heart isn’t really in it, and he’s not sure Sam sees, his eyes are sagging shut again. They rest there for a while, Sam’s cheek getting colder against Dean’s hand. “Dean?” he says eventually.

“Yeah,” says Dean.

Sam opens his eyes again, squinting. “We good?” he asks.

Sam’s always been a stubborn idiot. Stubborn enough to wreck the world, stubborn enough to fix it, stubborn enough to need to be forgiven a few hundred times over before he can get it through his thick head. Dean’s gotten tired of it, to be honest. He’ll do it once more, though. Even if this is it, the last thing Sam needs so he can let go. Dean’s not enough of a selfish bastard to withhold it, just to keep Sam there a minute or two more. He grips Sam’s face hard enough to hurt, hard enough that Sam can feel it.

“Don’t you doubt it, Sammy,” he says, fierce and distinct as he can make it. “Don’t you dare fucking doubt it. Not for a fucking second.”

It seems like it’s enough. The lines in Sam’s forehead relax, that familiar scrunched, worried look. Dean smooths the last of it away, brushing the hair aside. Sam’s thirty-five, for Christ’s sake, and his hair still looks like a friggin’ girl’s.

Dean’s humming something, he’s not sure what, probably Metallica. Lisa was always laughing at him and telling him off for the stuff he thought suitable for babies, getting Sally settled when she was teething. It works, though, because Sam turns his head a bit against Dean’s thigh and it gets heavier, the way Sally’s does when she’s dropping off, the way Sammy’s did way back when, and after a bit he stops breathing. Another hunter down.

Sam’s life wasn’t bad, though, as hunters' lives go, not after the demon blood and the devil and the hell stuff were done with. He’d gotten Bobby to teach him Japanese, he’d had a sweet ride – Dean should know, he tuned her up every time Sam visited – he’d held his niece when she was three days old and made Dean take the cigar he’d bought him and laughed himself redder in the face than Dean when Dean coughed his lungs out smoking it. He’d rung up a damn ledger’s worth of people out there riding tricycles and running Wall Street and hoeing fucking turnips, for all Dean knows, because Sam Winchester had put his life on the line to save them. It wasn’t so bad.

True, he didn’t have the wife or the stepson or the daughter starting preschool, he wouldn’t have the college loans and the empty nest and the first twinge of something that would turn into tests and a diagnosis and “I’m sorry, there’s no more we can do,” and “survived by” and a neat headstone. But he’d earned his forgiveness a thousand times over, that and the heaven he’s in if Cas knows what’s good for him. Because Dean has killed angels, he killed fucking Raphael, archangel of the Lord, thank you very much, and Cas will know Dean’s not joking around when it comes to Sam’s final destination. So there’s that. And Sam will never wake up to the alarm going off the day after his brother died for good and real.

Dean runs his hand through Sam’s hair one last time, licks his thumb and wipes the blood off his chin, where it’s turning dry and brown and flaky, and shifts him gently off his lap, onto the scuffed snow. He stands up, feeling stiff and elderly, though he’s not quite forty. His butt is wet from the snow.

“Help me get this off him,” he says to Cas, “We need to burn the body.”


End file.
